


something just like this

by writingfromthevoid (astrifer0us)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gunslinger Vex, Mentions of other characters - Freeform, Ranger Percy, classwap au, temporary of course
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-22 16:14:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21079655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrifer0us/pseuds/writingfromthevoid
Summary: in an alternate world, percy draws his bow with pepper on his shoulder, and vex shoots with her handmade trinketsORa self-indulgent class-swap AU





	something just like this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alatarmaia4](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alatarmaia4/gifts).

it starts like this –

Percival (Percy to friends and family, Freddie to particularly annoying friends and family) is a good shot. When he’s not in the castle library, or his study, or at dinner, he’s out in the woods, shooting targets and later game, learning how to skin his catches and fletch new arrows from the huntmaster.

But here’s how it is.

Lord and Lady Briarwood visit Castle Whitestone. They have dinner together, polite and amicable. He wakes up in the dungeons. He is tortured. He is freed. His sister bleeds out in the snow. He runs. He keeps running.

He doesn’t stop running until his dreams turn dark. When he wakes, exhausted and sore, sat against a tree, a crow alights on his knee and caws at him.

She doesn’t leave, so he calls her Pepper and makes sure he gets his hands on some proper leather falconry gloves to handle her.

When he hunts down his torturer months later, she almost pecks the doctor’s eyes out before she is stuffed into a bag and he is thrown into a cell. Again.

She didn’t even bother to look at him.

and it ends like –

Percy takes his vengeance. Sylas is scattered to mist and ash in bright, holy light. Delilah is shot, time and time again, and dragged through the halls. Pepper shrieks and tears and claws.

And then she bursts into shadow.

A familiar, beaked shadow. A shadow that haunts his dreams even now.

Orthax tears vengeful, vicious claws into his soul, tears at his hatred and his pain and the darkness inside his heart. His friends shoot him frightened, apologetic looks, as the bird is submerged in acid, feathers burning with an acrid stench. Himself, calm and complacent under a charm he will only later realise was placed on him.

He wishes he could say that he did not cry in relief when he wakes next dawn to the cawing of a crow in his windowsill.

Pepper buries herself in his arms, and he lets himself cry.

on the other side of the country, it starts like –

Vex’ahlia has always had a bright mind. She delights in the complications of a puzzle, the tinkering with something that barely even needs fixing. Her brother delivers her scraps of metal and she warps them into beautiful things, things that make small, melodic sounds and catch the light in odd ways, things she can sell on the market, trade for shiny coins and bits of food.

When the two of them have their first altercation with someone that wants their life, she turns to more practical matters. She studies the crossbows in weapon stores until the owners chase her out, sketches ideas onto anything she can get her hands on. Finds powder that explodes at a spark, encases her mechanisms in metal. It’s her own personal little Trinket, and it keeps them safe on the streets at night.

Byroden burns with a vengeance, and smoulders on long after her brother pushes her into the surrounding woods. They hunch over a makeshift campfire, hours later, and it is with tears still hot in her eyes that she goes to sleep, her dreams filled with images of dragon’s fire.

They find a new home in a group of people that welcome her and her brother like her father never had. They’re an odd bunch, but they’re good.

They’re who she trusts to have her back when the red dragon soars over the city, when the nightmares return, when they scramble over themselves to find a way to fight back.

and this is where it ends –

They’re still searching, still scrambling. One dragon dead, another a tentative ally. The forests of the Fey threaten to kill them at every duskward or tangleward turn. The tree is rotting, corrupted by an inside force, and when an archfey asks for her heart, the decision isn’t complicated at all.

Later, she will sit in her room, and scratch elven letters into the barrel of her Trinket. Yes, Thordak must die, and yes, her mother is always in her thoughts. But she cannot let vengeance rot her heart like it did Saundor’s.

She has to forgive.

this is where it begins –

“I think I can do something with this,” Percy mumbles, turning the gun over and over in his hands. There is still sorrow in both of their eyes, even if Pike has been returned to them. Guilt, that neither of them could do more to save her. Her bullets had been near useless against the creature that had cut their cleric in half like a discard doll.

He returns to her weeks later, with arcane symbols faintly glowing on the handle of the weapon. “It’s nothing much, but-”

“I love it. Thank you.”

Vex glances down at the gun, just missing the smile Percy gives her. When she goes out to shoot, he watches from the window as she fills her targets with crackling bullets.

like this –

Percy has his mask on, and smoke curls out from under the hooked beak. Pepper sits on his shoulder, cleaning the gore out from between her talons. Casual, unbothered. Like she didn’t just claw someone’s eyes out.

She clutches his hand, just for a moment. Enough for him to look at her, red lenses and black, curling smoke.

“Darling.” She squeezes, once. “Take the mask off.”

She turns to fire. When she looks back, Percy is loosening arrows.

But the mask is off, and she swears, even for just a moment, the smoke starts to dissipate.

like this –

“They’re definitely not worth you.”

like –

“You’ll have to amend that. It’s _Lady_ Vex’ahlia.

like –

Saundor asks for her heart.

But it’s not his.

It can never be.

“It’s someone else’s.”

and this is how it ends –

The beholder falls, defeated, and a relieved sigh goes through the room. Her brother goes off to help Kima, but her eyes are drawn towards the tomb. Percy follows, and both of them study it for only a moment.

He reaches out.

She remembers little of dying, later. Just the pain, searing hot and icy cold at the same time as it raced through her already weakened body. Blackness. Voices, muddled. And then, waking. Feeling wet tears on her cheeks, tears that aren’t hers. Her brother, nails digging into his palms.

Percy, guilt-ridden and apologetic. His fault she died, his fault they had to bring her back.

She doesn’t see it that way, of course.

and this –

They find her on the isle of Glintshore. Surrounded by lackeys, well defended, and well-armed.

And smoking.

Both of them left their mark on Anna Ripley, it seems.

She raises a gun that crackles with magic, and bullets tear into Percy’s chest.

Her own bullet tears a hole into Anna’s heart.

Percy bleeds out on the broken ground.

There, lying on the cold, stone slab of the altar, she gives him what she’s been saving for months.

“I should have told you. It’s yours.”

is how –

“We’ll talk later.”

it ends –

Their proposal is more of a series of dares.

Their marriage is a quiet and solemn affair.

Taryon knows.

Then Scanlan knows.

Then Pelor knows, and by then the cat is out of the bag.

And later, later still, with Sylas ash again and her hair still dripping with seawater, they say yes once more under the starlight of the Marquesian sky.


End file.
